Category: Congress

It’s like They Are Playing to Lose

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The headline in New York Magazine says it all, “Democrats Strip $1,400 Checks From 12 Million for No Reason.” 

That’s 12 million voters who know that the Democrats lied to them, and they were likely the margin of victory in at least one of the Georgia runoffs that gave Democrats Joe Manchin control of the US Senate.

This is horrible policy, about $8 billion in a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, 0.42%, and it is worse politics.


The official hat of the Biden Administration

The stimulus checks are the single most popular part of the bill, but the so-called moderates in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needed a scalp so that they could wave their dicks, and Biden caves.

To quote not-Tallyrand, (it is frequently misattributed to him) “It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

Democrats often wonder why they don’t get more votes, because their policies are popular.

They don’t get more votes because people do not believe that Democrats will actually follow through.

If You Have Neither on Your Side, Pound the Table

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With prospects for both a minimum wage hike and Neera Tanden’s becoming head of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB) dimming, the Biden administration has decided to ignore the minimum wage and go all in on the (rather unqualified and genuinely horrible person) Neera Tanden and ignore the plight of roughly 48 million people working for less than the proposed $15 per hour.

In their desperation, an old lawyer’s adage applies, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.“

In this case, pounding the table means, ignoring the reasons for the opposition, as venal and corrupt as they and playing the “Race Card,” which in this case means getting Americans of South Asian extraction riled up about this simply because Tanden is of South Asian extraction:

President Joe Biden’s aides are urging Asian American groups to mount a last-minute campaign to try to rescue his budget chief nominee, Neera Tanden, as her prospects for Senate confirmation dwindle.

Those groups are calling and sending letters to Senate offices and advocating for Tanden on social media to try to combat what they are calling “structural racism” and “institutional racism.”

Their efforts have been actively encouraged by the White House and presidential transition staff, which remains in place to help with Senate confirmations, along with the Democratic National Committee, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

The opposition to her comes from two real, though stupid and corrupt, sources, Republican butt-hurt over her mean Tweets (as if there is any other kind of Tweet), and Joe Manchin’s decades long project to use his power as an elected official to benefit his daughter. (Manchin is lying about his being disturbed by the Tweets)

This is not an issue of Race.  If it were, Deb Haaland would have never gotten the nod, as indigenous Americans have always been further down in the racial hierarchy than pretty much everyone but Blacks and Hispanics.

Invoking racism is stupid and counter productive because it will not work and because it “wears out the batteries” on the tactic.

Keep your powder dry, because Tanden is all wet.

What Should Be Done Now, and Won’t Be Done

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Now that the Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that a minimum wage increase cannot be passed through the reconciliation process, the course of action is clear, or at least it should be.

The President of the Senate, Vice President Kamala Harris, can overrule the unelected Senate official, and it would require a vote of 60 Senators to overrule her decision.

Unfortunately, given that Biden has already said that he thought that a minimum wage increase was dead, and Biden’s chief of staff has said that Harris would not rule against her, it appears that they are playing to lose.

Not a surprise.  Learned helplessness, is an innate trait of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), and Joe Biden has enormous affection for an institution frequently called, “A Petri Dish for Psychopaths.”

If they were not cowards or delusional, here is what would happen:

On Thursday, a key Senate official advised Democratic lawmakers that the chamber’s rules do not allow them to include a minimum wage increase in President Joe Biden’s first COVID-19 relief legislation. The ruling from the parliamentarian means that Vice President Kamala Harris could decide the fate of one of the Democratic Party’s most significant campaign promises — but it remains unclear what she will end up doing.

As the presiding officer of the Senate, Harris — who has long touted her support for a $15 minimum wage — can now use the power her predecessors have used to ignore the advisory opinion and fulfill Biden’s campaign promise to boost the wage. A confidential memo obtained by The Daily Poster now circulating on Capitol Hill spells out exactly how that could be accomplished.

However, White House chief of staff Ron Klain this week declared that Harris will refuse to use that power — a decision that would effectively put the Biden-Harris administration in the position of potentially killing the prospect of minimum wage legislation for the foreseeable future. Immediately after the parliamentarian’s ruling, the White House issued a statement reiterating Klain’s comment, declaring that “Biden respects the parliamentarian’s decision.”

Some congressional Democrats have already been arguing that the Biden administration’s refusal to overrule the parliamentarian would be immoral and a political disaster for their party.

………

As such, Democrats are working to pass the COVID bill using the convoluted budget reconciliation process. The process will allow for a simple majority vote on the final legislation, but it also allows Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough to recommend tossing certain provisions if she decides they violate the so-called Byrd Rule, which is designed to prohibit extraneous matters outside of federal spending issues to be added to budget legislation.

BTW, while not common, overruling the parliamentarian is by means rare, particularly given that the Senate can pass one reconciliation bill in a year:

Vice presidents have ignored the parliamentarian in the past. According to Slate, “Vice President Hubert Humphrey routinely ignored his parliamentarian’s advice.”

Roll Call reported last month: “Precedents for ignoring parliamentary advice include 1967, 1969, and 1975 efforts to change the Senate’s threshold to end debate from a two-thirds vote to three-fifths.”

 ………

In a new memo circulating to lawmakers and obtained by The Daily Poster, Harris’s power as the presiding Chair of the Senate is spelled out, citing a precedent set during the Clinton administration.

“It would take 60 votes to overturn the ruling of the Chair on a Byrd Rule point of order, regardless of what the Parliamentarian advises,” states the memo. “Based on a search of the Congressional Record, it appears that only twice has the chair’s ruling on a Byrd Rule point of order been appealed. Both instances occurred on August 6, 1993, during consideration of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993. Neither appeal garnered the 60 affirmative votes necessary to overturn the Chair’s ruling.”

Like I said, the Dems are playing to lose, and come 2022, lose they will.

Manchin to Support Haaland for Secretary of the Interior

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After publicly playing Hamlet for a few days, Joe Manchin (DINO-WV) has announced that he will support the nomination of Deb Halland as Secretary of the Interior.

Why her, she participated in protests against the Keystone XL pipeline, which as a VERY pro fossil fuel Senator from a coal state he should find even more unsettling than a few mean Tweets about Republicans made by Neera Tanden.

The idea that only CEO contributes to a company’s growth and not all employees is really pernicious https://t.co/2d9xgU0IHJ

— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) August 27, 2016

Pretty mild, actually

It turns out that Manchin is probably lying about his reason to oppose Tanden.

It seems that his daughter, Heather Bresch, academic fabulist and CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, was criticized by Tanden for raising her own pay while gouging consumers for the Epipen® anaphylaxis treatment

This would not be the first time that Manchin has used his official position to benefit his daughter. His finger prints are all over an effort to get Bresch an MBA degree that she did not earn. 

So Joe Manchin’s actions here are even more stupid, sordid, and corrupt than I had previously imagined.

Still no sympathy for Ms. Tanden though.  She’s a hack and a psychopath, and she shut down a publication in response to unionization, so am firmly of the belief that she should not be kitchen staff supervisor* at the White House, much less director of the OMB.

*It’s a reference to the comic book Cerebus the Aardvark.

It Was Racism that Killed the Beast

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Dan Froomkin has a must-read analysis on the testimony of former Capitol Police Chief Steve Sund before Congress.

In it he conclusively shows that Sund is deliberately deceptive to Congress, focusing on a poorly distributed FBI memo (the January 5 memo) from the day before the assault on the Capitol, while misleading about a far more detailed and extensive report from his own Capitol police from two days earlier, which was given to him, where his own intelligence unit warned about the very real possibility of a actions by the protesters where, “Congress itself is the target.”

I agree with Froomkin’s assessment:  Lund’s lackadaisical response stems not from bad intelligence, but from racism:

Steven Sund, the disgraced former chief of the Capitol Police Department, was explicitly warned in a Jan. 3 memo from his own intelligence unit that thousands of desperate, violence-prone Trump supporters were planning to target Congress on Jan. 6, encouraged by the president himself.

The memo didn’t really say much more than was already obvious to anyone paying attention, but it was authoritative, detailed, and, of course, prescient.

Sund waved it off. He didn’t bother to share it with the rank and file. He didn’t equip his frontline officers with tear gas, or other non-lethal crowd-control weapons, or riot gear. Instead, he sent them out in street uniforms to man barricades made of bike racks, and get the shit beaten out of them, in one case fatally. He let the Capitol fall to a mob.

But in his first public comments on Tuesday, Sund had the breath-taking gall to blame the breach of the Capitol not on his own poor decision-making, but on a “clear lack of accurate and complete intelligence across several federal agencies.”

………

The Feb. 5 FBI report was shared with the Capitol Police intelligence unit. Sund said he didn’t get it, however, and under leading questioning from Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon blamed the unit’s director, John Donahue, for that.

………

Sund’s story is that because of flawed intelligence, he judged the danger posed by the Jan. 6 protests as similar in scale to that posed by previous pro-Trump rallies nearby, none of which amounted to much.

But take a few moments to read this one, “redacted” excerpt from the internal Jan. 3 memo that the Post made public. Sund’s excuses fall apart. (The public really needs to see the full, unredacted memo, by the way.)

Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out. Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021, as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent. Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protesters as they were previously, but rather Congress itself is the target on the 6th. As outlined above, there has been a worrisome call for protesters to come to these events armed and there is the possibility that protesters may be inclined to become violent. Further, unlike the events on November 14, 2020, and December 12, 2020, there are several more protests scheduled on January 6, 2021, and the majority of them will be on Capitol grounds. The two protests expected to be the largest of the day – the Women for American First protest on the Ellipse and the Stop the Steal protest in Areas 8 and 9 — may draw thousands of participants and both have been promoted by President Trump himself. The Stop the Steal protest in particular does not have a permit, but several high profile speakers, including Members of Congress are expected to speak at the event. This combined with Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to significantly dangerous situations for law enforcement and the general public alike.

Imagine reading that memo and failing to put your own officers on red alert; failing to prepare them to repel what seemed like an inevitable onslaught.

The closest any senator came to asking about that was Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. “It’s not that we had inadequate resources, but a failure to deploy the people that we were supposed to,” he told Sund. He noted that Sund had in a previous letter acknowledged knowing that white supremacist groups and other extremist groups were expected on Jan. 6 and might become violent.

………

As Rep. Cori Bush – a veteran of many Black Lives Matter protests – put it on MSNBC the very evening of the insurrection: “Had it been people who look like me, had it been the same amount of people, but had they been Black and brown, we wouldn’t have made it up those steps… we would have been shot, we would have been tear gassed.”

The reporting on this element of the story – why Sund and the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, also older white males, weren’t particularly alarmed by the MAGA horde – has been terrible. Nearly nonexistent.

The one exception has been an article by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan for ProPublica, based on interviews with 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers. They reported:

The interviews… revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

But nobody at the Senate hearing even mentioned the issue of race. Not once.

Nobody asked Sund to compare and contrast his preparedness for Jan. 6 with his preparedness for Black Lives Matter protests that weren’t even nearby. Nobody asked why Sund didn’t give front-line officers tear gas. Nobody asked Sund or the two sergeants-at-arms if the white privilege they shared with the mob had made it seem unthreatening to them, unlike the “other”.

This was willful blindness driven by (at best) privilege, and the Congressmen questioning should have (metaphorically) strung up Sund by his entrails over this.

He just lied to Congress, and he deliberately hung men under his command out to dry, but the story of the mainstream media is going to be about how this mook is a victim of circumstance.

Today in Evil

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After discovering that municipal broadband is better and cheaper than what you can get from the incumbent carriers, House Republicans introduce legislation banning the practice, because there is not enough opportunity for graft campaign donations the private sector when the government does the job better and cheaper.

Everyone hates their private ISP, the Dems should run on this, but the moderates want to continue to extract protection money campaign donations from the Baby Bells as well:

House Republicans this week proposed legislation that would ban the creation of municipal broadband networks at a federal level, and shutter networks in areas where some private competition exists – purportedly to improve internet access across the US.

Dubbed the CONNECT Act (Communities Overregulating Networks Need Economic Competition Today), the bill [PDF] says: “A State or political subdivision thereof may not provide or offer for sale to the public, a telecommunications provider, or to a commercial provider of broadband internet access service, retail or wholesale broadband internet access service.”

The CONNECT Act would also ban states from operating municipal broadband networks in areas where two or more private operators exist. The language here is fairly vague, and it doesn’t state how affected operators should dispose of their existing infrastructure. It’s also fairly limited about what constitutes a “private operator”, deferring only to the barebones definition in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).

………

Twenty-two states have passed laws that either prohibit municipal broadband entirely, or impose restrictions that make municipal broadband projects significantly harder to launch and operate. Minnesota, for example, requires municipalities to obtain a supermajority (65 per cent) of voters in a referendum before providing telecommunications services. Montana and Pennsylvania only permit projects if there is no private competition. Texas and Missouri have outright bans on municipal broadband.

The Democratic response should be to pass legislation preempting the state bans and offering subsidies (which would be smaller than those given to the likes of AT&T and Verizon) for the establishment of municipal broadband.

They should, but they won’t.

It’s Like Having Your Mother-in-Law Drive off a Cliff in Your Brand New Car

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So, the worst “Democrat” in the Senate, Joe Manchin, has come out against Biden’s choice of Neera Tanden, the worst think tank drone ever to come out of the Clinton machine, to head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

What’s more, he has done so for the worst possible reason, because Tanden is mean to Republicans sometimes. (Her venom toward Republicans is her ONLY redeeming feature)

The awfulness of the distinguished gentleman from West Virginia is self evident, but I’ll list a bill of particulars on Tanden: (It’s an updatepast from an old post if it sounds familiar)

I am hoping for a way that they can both lose, because neither of them deserve a win ever: 

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Friday that he would oppose Neera Tanden‘s nomination to head the White House budget office, potentially sinking her Senate confirmation.

Manchin cited Tanden’s harsh tweets about Republicans as the reason for his opposition.

“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” Manchin said in a statement. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination.”>br>
………

“Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent Budget Director and we look forward to the committee votes next week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties,” Biden press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement distributed to reporters in response to Manchin’s remarks.

No, she’s a vacuous party hack, not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

The problem is that cannot keep good staff, has never had an original idea in her life, and has an affection for bad policy and bad politics that rivles that of her old boss, Hillary Clinton.

In a CNN interview Friday afternoon, Sanders was non-committal about supporting Tanden’s nomination, saying that he would speak to her next week about “what she wants to do.” Sanders reiterated that he was less concerned with her previous rhetoric than her future actions.

And Bernie Sanders is the only person in this entire sordid affair who is behaving like a mensch, probably because he is the only one in this entire sordid affair who values anything beyond his own career.

Where Will You Find 5 Honest Republicans

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I cannot get to that number unless I count dead Republicans, so Nancy Pelosi’s proposal for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection seems to be dead on arrival.

One need only to back to the 911 commission, where any idea of investigation of who f%$#ed it up, and holding those individuals accountable, was thrown out the window from the get-go.

It’s not that you cannot find people in the Republican Party with enough animus directed toward Trump to call him out, but the job involves calling out the entire Republican Party establishment, and beyond the “QAnon Shaman”, I cannot think of anyone else who might be inclined to do this:

There is no more terrifying a term in Washington for anyone who wants to know what actually happened than the phrase, “blue-ribbon commission.” It raises memories of past monsters like Simpson-Bowles, [Even though Simpson-Bowles was created and structured by Barack Obama specifically to facilitate the privatization of Social Security] and Tower (Iran-Contra), and 9/11—flashy public hearings followed by reports with all the sharp edges sanded off by internal politics, followed by leaks from dissatisfied staffers in which the staffers claim that they had The Answer, if only the commission members weren’t so a) corrupt, b) partisan, and c) starstruck. In a few years, everybody gets jobs on cable news shows so they can opine on the work of the special blue-ribbon commission looking into whatever the next catastrophe is. A Blue-Ribbon Commission is the living embodiment of the concept of Better Than Nothing. From the Washington Post:

Two days after former president Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate of inciting the deadly attack, Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled in a letter to Democratic colleagues that the House would soon consider legislation to form a commission to “investigate and report” on the attack and interference in election proceedings, as well as an appropriation to pay for enhanced security features on the Capitol grounds…

Supporters of the commission say such an initiative will have broader authority than those committees to pursue testimony from those in Trump’s orbit — voices that were not part of the impeachment inquiry. The commission will not be under the time constraints of those committee investigations as it produces its findings. Lawmakers in both parties speaking on Sunday news shows endorsed the idea for an independent investigation modeled after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, established in 2002 by Congress and President George W. Bush, which published a report with recommendations to guard against future attacks.

The 9/11 Commission did a great job marshaling the facts in service to producing recommendations. It did not do a great job marshaling the facts in service of informing the nation about who had screwed the pooch throughout the summer and fall of 2001. And, as Pete Williams explained on MSNBC Tuesday Morning, this was an era in which bipartisanship was not entirely a curse upon the land. Co-chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean even agreed that they would only do joint appearances. And still, a substantial portion of the commission’s membership and staff fought over the still highly flammable issue of the Bush administration’s failures of responsibility. That was then. This is now. And, on Monday night, Joy Reid got her teeth down to the bone when she asked her guests which Republicans they would trust on a commission to examine the role of a Republican president* in inciting an insurrection for which their Senate brethren just this weekend largely gave him a pass. It’s a question worth asking before everybody agrees that this commission will be the final word on anything.

Bipartisan, schmipartisan.  You won’t get sh%$ out of such a commission.

The Republicans will be determined to cover up for their fellow Republicans, and the Democrats will be determined to cover up for everyone.

I Am So Hoping That Matt Taibbi Is Wrong

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Unfortunately, his analysis is pretty good, so his take that Kurt Shilling is the future of the modern conservative movement is rather alarming.

This is a guy who makes Donald Trump look measured and intelligent:

Curt Schilling, cauldron-bellied baseball star turned political activist, has apparently decided to run for Senate in Massachusetts. His goal will be ousting an icon of the liberal hegemony he proudly despises.

………

If you think the white-guy grievance movement will die after Donald Trump’s likely landslide defeat this November, think again. There will be plenty of filterless, self-pitying dunces to carry the torch in Trump’s place. Schilling is a leading candidate.

His story, maybe even more than Trump’s, is a parable on the comically comprehensive inability of some to recognize the advantages us white guys enjoy.

………

More recently, Schilling worked at ESPN, where he was paid $2.5 million a year to be an analyst.

He needed the money. Soon after his playing career ended, he blew his $50 million fortune on a failed video game venture, a fiasco that cost Rhode Island taxpayers $75 million.

After that, he fell back into the ESPN gig, which should have been easy money. For all his other qualities, Schilling is an excellent baseball analyst (although, humorously, his ex-teammate and rival Pedro Martinez is better).

But Curt couldn’t keep his job. As is usually the case with people who can’t hold on to gravy-train situations, the culprit was addiction. In Schilling’s case, it wasn’t booze or pills, but line-crossing political rants.

………

Having proven incapable of running a business, being a good steward of either his own money or the taxpayers’, or holding down the world’s cushiest job, Schilling naturally decided to get into politics.

Don’t bet against him winning a Senate seat in my home state of Massachusetts, either. His would be a victory for the cause of ignorance and tone-deafness perhaps even exceeding Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination.

………

Schilling should wake up every morning and compose a five-page letter to God thanking him for the American white-guy lifestyle jackpot. Instead, he’s consumed with bitterness over the raw deal he thinks people like him have gotten.

In this, he’s very much like Donald Trump, who spent much of his adult life partying with models and celebrities and somehow emerged in late middle age as the most obdurate complainer in American history.

………

This shouldn’t be too big an ask, since (as the likes of Trump and Schilling regularly prove) American white men still mostly run the world and live highly failure-resistant existences. Just take yes for an answer, enjoy the ride, and try to have the decency to not act like a victim; that’s all anyone asks.

But they can’t do it. The Schilling/Trump principle is never shutting up, particularly on topics about which they are ignorant, which is pretty much all of them. This is a movement, not limited to Trump, and it’s not going to end anytime soon. God help us.

If Taibbi is right, and I think that he is, this likely is an indicator of a society in precipitous decline into absurdity and obscurity.

The 38 Minute Debate

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova finally had a debate ……… for about 38 minutes ……… on a Sunday morning.

Needless to say, it it got kind of heated, which is not surprising.

When you have what amounts to just ½ a debate, you don’t have the time to explore policy differences:

Hostility oozed from South Florida TV screens Sunday morning as Tim Canova and Debbie Wasserman Schultz faced off in their first, and likely only, debate before the Aug. 30 Democratic congressional primary.

Incumbent Wasserman Schultz and challenger Canova clashed on a handful of issues, most notably on Israel and Social Security, which are both important in the Broward/Miami-Dade County 23rd Congressional District, home to a large Jewish community and to many seniors.

Even sharper exchanges concerned charges about judgment, temperament and commitment to South Florida. The two repeatedly expressed exasperation with each other, often seeking to interrupt the other to make a point.

I watched a bit of it at the site, but I cannot stand listening to DWS.

I don’t think that it will make much of a difference.

It was at a time when no one tuned in, and it was too short, which was what Wasserman Schultz wanted.

F%$# Me. I Agree with Rand Paul.

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I guess that we file this under that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, because Senator Aqua Buddha is opposing the massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia because of their indiscriminate brutality in Yemen:

Citing concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he’s looking for ways to stop a $1.15 billion weapons deal with Riyadh that would include the sale of 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored vehicles, and other military equipment.

Paul’s pledge comes as Saudi Arabia resumed its bombardment of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa following the collapse of peace talks in Kuwait between representatives of the government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“I will work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale,” Paul told Foreign Policy in a statement. “Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

Humanitarian organizations are criticizing the proposed weapons sale as a setback for efforts to bring pressure on Riyadh to throttle back its military campaign. The U.N. estimates that at least 6,400 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict while more than 2.8 million have been displaced from their homes.

He’s right.

Saudi Arabia provided support for the 911 bombers, and they created ISIS.

They are not our allies, and we should not be helping them in Yemen, which, among other things, has resulted in a massive increase in the power of al Qaeda in that nation.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Explores New Frontiers in Lame

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Remember when I wrote that Debbie Wasserman Schults had agreed to debates with primary challenger Tim Canova?

Now we learn that the Congresswoman has defined agreeing to debate as one 15 minute long joint appearance. After the introductions and opening statements, that leaves time for ……… well ……… nothing:

Last week, Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Sun Sentinel Editor, Rosemary O’Hara, that she was in debate discussions with me. That statement was a complete fabrication. In fact, Wasserman Schultz and no one from her campaign has ever responded to the debate challenge that I made back in April.

Days ago, I tried again in an open letter and by email to Wasserman Schultz and her staff to suggest a series of two-hour debates. Again, I never received any reply. Instead, Jim Defede of WFOR CBS 4 Local News sent an invitation to both candidates to debate on his Sunday morning 8:30am talk show, Facing South Florida. At 4pm, my campaign learned that Wasserman Schultz said she “scheduled” a debate.

After four months of dodging debates and running scared, Wasserman Schultz now wants to schedule a 15 minute debate? If she believes one 15 minute debate is sufficient to defend her record, it shows she’s learned nothing from her failures in scheduling debates at the DNC before her shameful resignation. In April, I proposed a series of real debates, and that’s still my hope, that the voters will get the benefit of hearing us discuss the issues in more than one debate of at least two-hours each to cover a wide range of issues of importance to all of us.

Great googly moogly.

DWS has got to be the lamest politician in Florida, and considering that Jeb “Miss Congeniality” Bush and Rick “Governor Batboy” Scott are Florida politicians, that’s saying a lot.

I so hope Tim Canova wins the primary.

I Really Hope That They Stream This Online

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We now know that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is concerned about the primary later this month, because has just agreed to debate Tim Canova:

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Thursday she would debate her primary challenger Tim Canova.

“I have always said that when we got to August that I would focus on the question of whether or not I was going to debate my opponent,” she said in a brief telephone interview. “I am going to debate my opponent.”

Canova’s campaign treated the development like a victory. “It’s good news for the residents of South Florida,” Canova said. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has never had to account for her record. She’s never engaged in a debate as long as she’s been a member of Congress. And it’s well past time to have that accounting.”

If you are comfortably in the lead, you pretend as if your opponent does not exist.

She is agreeing to debate because she expects the primary to be close.

I’ll post updates about when and where the debates will be, but in the meantime, throw some money at Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page which is currently set up to split contributions between Tim Canova and Alan Grayson, who is running for Florida Senate against former Republican, serial fabulist, and Wall Street BFF Patrick Murphy.

Brownback’s Folly

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Turns out Speaker Boehner is indeed enjoying Kansas primary night. Just received this from former staffer! pic.twitter.com/hIzmFt8hn0

— carl hulse (@hillhulse) August 3, 2016

Well, Boehner is happy

Yesterday was primary night in Kansas, and Governor Sam Brownback’s motley crew of Teabagger scum got served:

A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators lost their seats as moderate Republicans made Tuesday’s primary election a referendum on the state’s budget problems and education funding.

Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, of Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. Bruce’s defeat came amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies that appeared to spell trouble for conservatives.

“The way the state has been going, we have so many problems, and we need some changes to be made,” said Stanley Prichard, a 46-year-old manufacturing worker from Hutchinson, who voted for Berger in the Republican primary.

Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state’s most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.

The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state’s fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Browback got a sh%$ load of money a few years from the Koch Brothers to get antediluvian reactionary candidates, and once they were elected, they proceeded to destroy the state.

Their theory was that if they lowered taxes on rich folk to next to nothing, and strip mined government, that prosperity would ensue.

As you can see, it did not work.

BTW, one of the most obnoxious of Teabaggers in Congress, Tim Huelskamp, just got crushed in the primary.

Boehner is having a glass of wine to celebrate because he drinks a lot, and because Huelskamp was the most Teabagger of the Teabagger Caucus in the House of Representatives, and undermined the then Speaker at every turn.

I think that the new members of the state lege are in for a rude awakening if they think that Brownback will see this as anything by an excuse to double down on his failed policies, because in his mind, wing nuttery can never, it can only be failed.

Kansas will be having interesting times, as in the Chinese curse, over the next few years.

Debbie Wasserman Thrown Under Bus

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Then they backed up the bus, ran her over again, then broke out the steamroller, then got some kerosene and set fire to the remains, and finally sprinkled holy water over the ashes to ensure that she would never rise again.

This Politico article is as nasty a hit job I’ve seen on anyone in the media,

Among other revelations:

  • Ignoring a DNC fund raising need to raise funds for her own campaign from Joe Biden.
  • She also ignored another DNC need at the same meeting to ask Biden to show up to her daughter’s bat Mitzvah.
  •  Described her as, “An increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions..”
  • Hassled Obama staffers seats at an event, allegedly for her big donors, and then gave those seats to her family.

Read the rest:  It’s brutal.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz may very well be more loathed by her fellow party members than Ted Cruz is loathed by his.

I cannot help but think that they actually want her to lose the primary to Tim Canova this August.

h/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

I So Hope that DWS Loses the Primary

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We now have reports that Bernie Sanders will cmapaign against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the upcoming Congressional primary:

In an interview with USA Today, Bernie Sanders announced plans for the Sanders Institute and other educational and political organizations to continue the revolution his campaign spawned.

Sanders will also be campaigning for at least 100 progressives around the country—including democrat Tim Canova, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s primary congressional challenger.

………

With Sanders’ endorsement for Clinton behind him, his next steps leading up to the Democratic National Convention are to maintain a progressive presence within the party. As Wasserman Schultz was spared in negotiations for Sanders’ endorsement, the next best way to maintain a progressive presence is by ensuring she loses her reelection bid to a more progressive alternative like Tim Canova.

Canova has already raised over $2 million in his congressional race against Wasserman Schultz, in large part thanks to contributions from disenfranchised Sanders supporters. His momentum has received backlash from Democrats keen on keeping Wasserman Schultz in Congress.

………

Even though Wasserman Schultz’s Democratic primary is just around the corner—on August 30—she has consistently refused to debate Canova, and has limited her exposure as DNC chair. While Wasserman Schultz has avoided the public eye, Canova has exposed a litany of her policy shortfalls among progressives. The Miami Herald reported that Wasserman Schultz broke down in tears after the Florida AFL-CIO declined to endorse her, due to her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement—which Canova staunchly opposes.

Gee. She has a sad, because a labor union declined to endorse her because she has proved herself implacably hostile to the needs and desires of that union.

This is how politics is supposed to work.

Canova’s support for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidelines pushed Wasserman Schultz to flip-flop in her support for payday lenders. He also recently challenged Wasserman Schultz’s vote in favor of the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, which allows pension and benefit cuts to 400,000 American workers—many of them teamsters and union members.

Gee, supporting loan sharks, the TPP, and gutting union pensions?  I can’t imagine why, “the Florida AFL-CIO declined to endorse her.”

I so hope she is sent packing in the primary.

Quote of the Day

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I’m all for pragmatism and common sense in these things. All the regulars here know that. But, in this case, I’d almost rather have an open, declared enemy than this back-stabbing false balancing oligarch sock puppet. He’s just a prettier version of Joe Lieberman. He’s one of that tiny handful of people who make me sound like the people I deride as the rainbow farting unicorn-mounted purity cavalry.

—a Comment from ncsteve on Talking Points Memo in response to the news that contemptible Evan Bayh is running for Senate Again.

I wholeheartedly agree.

About F%$#ing Time

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I’m not calling for reinstituting the draft, but it’s good that they have stopped excluding women from Selective Service registration:

By a 85-13 vote on Tuesday, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year. It did not include amendments that would have required greater authorization for conflicts, and did not include an amendment from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to end Selective Service. Instead, it welcomed women into Selective Service for the first time, starting in 2018, unless that policy is stripped when the bill goes to conference.

The vote contained some element of surprise, as Republicans had stopped the female draft provision in the House. In fact, its presence in that version of the NDAA was a kind of ruse gone wrong. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a military veteran opposed to women serving in combat, proposed the draft amendment during mark-up, to make a point. Expecting the amendment to fail, he voted against it, ready to argue that Democrats and other supporters of women in combat were hypocrites.

Hopefully this makes it to Obama’s desk.

I’m With Jim………

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Specifically Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut.

As much as I hate praising a vice chair of the Wall Street loving New Democrat Coalition, particularly one who is an alumnus of the Vampire Squid, but he is right when he announces that he is going to boycott the Congressional moment of silence for the Tampa shooting victims, because it is hypocritical political theater that is used to excuse cowardly inaction:

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) says he won’t participate in any more moments of silence on the House floor for victims of mass shootings out of frustration that they don’t lead to action on gun control.

In a House floor speech on Monday, the day after the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Himes said the moments of silence offer a symbol of lawmakers’ lack of a legislative response to mass shootings.

“Silence. That is how the leadership of the most powerful country in the world will respond to this week’s massacre of its citizens,” he said.

“Silence. Not me. Not anymore. I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity and tepid smugness of a House complicit in the weekly bloodshed,” Himes said angrily.………

………

“As you bow your head and think of what you say to your God when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of innocents, there will be silence,” Himes said.

Himes first declared his boycott of future moments of silence in a series of tweets late Sunday night, writing that they “have become an abomination.”

He may be a conservadem, but he’s completely right on this issue.

The moment of silence is a completely hypocritical excuse for doing nothing.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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It looks like the FBI managed to sneak language into the intelligence authorization bill allowing the FBI to demand email and logs from an ISP without a warrant:

A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs — most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

Since a 2008 Justice Department legal opinion, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand “electronic communication transactional records,” such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.

The spy bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, with the provision in it. The lone no vote came from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who wrote in a statement that one of the bill’s provisions “would allow any FBI field office to demand email records without a court order, a major expansion of federal surveillance powers.”

Wyden did not disclose exactly what the provision would allow, but his spokesperson suggested it might go beyond email records to things like web-surfing histories and other information about online behavior. “Senator Wyden is concerned it could be read that way,” Keith Chu said.

I know what you’re thinking:  That the FBI would never abuse its power to go after people they disagreed with politically and abuse their powers.

That’s why their headquarters is named after J. Edgar Hoover, because they would never function as a private army for a rogue director.